Having worked on Trulia Voices for a while and seen it grow into a vibrant community over just a few months, I’m still–nay, ever more–amazed at the group of people who have assembled on Trulia to talk about real estate.
Housing is a very hot topic, and we’re seeing lots of questions about how to deal with a changing market, whether buying or selling now is the right move, and even questions about how best to handle a foreclosure on your own home.
The topic is hot, and so are tempers. In every community you expect to find some friction between members–hey, we’re all one big family, right? As the party’s hosts, we at Trulia do a lot of soul-searching about how much moderation is too much, and how little is too little.
As a public forum, Trulia Voices brings together users from all walks of life, with various intentions, backgrounds, interests, styles and perspectives.
Part of what makes Voices, ActiveRain, MySpace, Google Groups and so many other sites appealing and enriching is that very diversity.
Of course, diversity means there are likely to be “undesirable” elements, by whatever criteria one may choose to define “undesirability.”
As such, I believe it is by and large every member’s responsibility and choice to pay attention to or ignore any other member on Trulia Voices. As providers of the platform, I believe the best thing Trulia can do is to give members the ability to use Voices and mold it as they see fit, rather than heavy-handedly moderate and censor Voices members’ activities excessively.
What if a member complains about another member? Should we remove, or remonstrate?
I personally feel we should laisser faire, and trust and enable you to make your own decisions about who and what to pay attention to.
I feel Voices is a better place the less involved Trulia is when it comes to its members and content.
What do you think? Is Trulia a Big Brother? Should we police Voices more, or less? Let us know, either here, or on Voices.
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November 18th, 2007 at 8:00 am
In every community, there needs to be some very basic rules. Without them, you’ll have a free for all that will tend to pull everyone down.
What kind of really basic rules? Here are a couple that occur to me off the top of my head:
* no racial, religious, sexual slurs
* (for agents) no disparaging the competition (which is legal to do but is a violation of the Realtors’ code of ethics) - it would be unfortunate if one poster came behind another and hurled insults at the previous guy so as to win over some business
* need more help? Here is a guideline: “if you could get sued for it doing it in the workplace, don’t do it here either”
In other words, play nicely or don’t play.
November 18th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Personally, I try not to censor too much because I like the raw contributions to discussions. However, profanity-strewn commentary and racial or ethnic remarks don’t belong in any discussion.
Healthy criticism is necessary especially in an industry like real estate.
November 18th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Stop counting answers and questions and they’ll be less likelihood of agents providing thoroughly useless answers without the slightest basis of local fact.
Laissez faire is excellent in general but the system itself has a major flaw.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:48 am
There is always going to be that one person who ruins it for everyone else. But for the most part, people are inherently good and too much intervention or restriction due to weeding out the bad apples is not going to be beneficial for the whole.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
trulia voices is new thing and moderation was very necessary for that,